The Raw Dog takes us on a journey of the imagination with a fluff review of the Astra militarum.

Reecius and Frakie talk about strategies for playing with and against the Astra Militarum.

Make sure to tune in to our YouTube channel and subscribe to catch the latest video bat rep on the way: Astra Militarum vs. Sisters of Battle!

The SoCal Open is coming up! Thanks to everyone that came by to help with terrain making, that was a lot of fun. We will have a terrain build weekend these next two weekends too, to get everything finalized and ready: October 7th and 8th and again October 14th and 15th.

We had posed the question to the SoCal Open 40k community whether they wanted to use our current ITC mission sets or look at using the new missions set we’ve been working on and quite humorously, it was a unanimous yes to use new missions designed for 8th ed. So, that is what we will do. These missions are still in beta, so to speak, and we will be looking to get some community feedback on them.

We’ve also been working on a league here at FLG, and we aim to get it rolling this month with sing-ups, structure, etc. and launch the first week of November. For now, we want to keep it to northern and southern San Diego county with an eye to expand in time. And as a reminder, leagues can count for ITC points! The only limitation is that we don’t count the number of rounds played as leagues often have a lot, so the scores they generate are lower and can only count as an RTT, but, they can still boost your score! Stay tuned for more information.

The New AM is a little bonkers. I am not really sure they are all that balanced from what i have seen so far. A little worried. Conscripts are not fixed supper cheap fearless troops with doubble tapping tanks russ’s. Seam really really very super good. Not sure how Tryanids can beat them Honestly. Seams a little hopeless with the data we have at present.

Nids do very well against AM. You are -1 to hit which right out the gates screws up a lot of their stuff, big time, and Hormagants are one of the best tie-up units in the game. And Biovores…lol. Biovores are out of hand.

No Nids aren’t -1 to be hit, unless your TO happen to allow outside codex units (Forgeworld Malanthropes) to patch built-in weaknesses in the army design. Many TO’s around the world don’t allow FW because they can’t earn a cent on them, it just means there’s a lot of added work to allow. Plus there’s some unbalanced stuff in there.

You can’t really factor in Venomthropes, they only protect slow Infantry units.
AM artillery outclasses Tyranid artillery by far, they play the no-LOS game so much better due to superiour toughness, number of wounds, and sheer cheapness.
Hive Guards are outranged and taken down unless the Tyranid player gets first turn, then they must focus down the Basilisks. Which means the Wyverns are left untouched to wreck your Genestealers/Hormagaunts.
Supierour numbers of CP, Orders and special rules make their artillery have a consistent high output with rerolls.
AM superheavy tanks can just ignore Nids while picking off a unit per turn.

Decent AM players layer their protective cannon fodder screens, so while your alpha strike Genestealer delete the first screen and consolidate into the second, they can just Fall Back, use a Stratagem to shoot anyway and delete any survivors with Wyverns or other shooting.

I think the reason that people are a little “up in arms” about this book is because they were hoping for a tune-down of the power level for Conscripts, and there really wasn’t one. The orders nerf is negligible, and otherwise everything roughly stayed the same or got better. Primaris Psykers are still amazing, etc etc.

While the Chaos faction is still the best in practice, many of their power pieces haven’t been updated, so I assume the hope here is that when those books are released or changed via Chapter Approved, they will be brought back in line with the rest of the game (Changeling, Malefic Lords, Magnus’ 3++, and hopefully some additional change to Brimstones).

The only other reason I can think of for Guard getting a strong reaction is the style of play that they have being somewhat non-interactive. They shoot at you, they don’t move around a ton…you try to stay alive long enough to kill some of them or to take objectives, so it’s basically the Guard player rolling dice at you and you taking saves and removing models. It also doesn’t give the impression of there being a lot of skill of the side of the Guard player (even though there definitely is quite a bit in deployment, placement, target priority, and planning).

Definitely feels like the best (most powerful) codex to be released so far.

I still want to know how chaos are performing better than guard. Guard based imp soup armies have topped almost every major tourney since the flyer nerf that I know of. Where have chaos pulled off more ranks than guard based imp soup?

One thing GW is doing right is either adding wounds, reducing points, or improving shooting, or all 3. Chaos this edition is the most flexible Ive seen it in years(Alpha legion is the chaos White Scars this edition but other legions can still compete) and AM finally has the components to be more than a leaf blower/ conscript spam if a player optimized the list. I feel that armies with codexes do currently have an unfair advantage compared to index armies, which is expected. And then harlequins won a tournament #MindBlown. I just wish they would release all the codexes faster so we could determine what armies will be the true top tiers/ taac lists. Looking forward to the first Xenos codex to see how they square up #Cheers

You don’t do the durability of conscripts justice. Yes, each individual conscript is easy to kill and that can mislead you into thinking that the units are soft. That doesn’t take pts efficiency into account – there are very few ways to kill them at range while using a reasonable amount of resources. You need the most efficient anti-infantry shooting, something like Guilliman-buffed assbacks, just to be able to make your points back in time. Dedicated melee units like Berzerkers are probably the most efficient conscript killers but such units killing conscripts is exactly what an AM player wants them to do.

This doesn’t mean that conscripts are an unbreakable wall, it just means that an AM player can and should bring a lot of them for cheap and a TAC army is typically not going to be able to kill them fast enough. Conscripts are only sort of bad in matchups where the opponent can ignore the conscripts and just shoot at the backline, but then they are still capping objectives with ObSec.

You really can fight against most builds especially with the update of double tap tanks. Anything that moves fast and is spammable such as jet packs, bikes, teleporting hordes, can damage them. Breaking the line is doable, but it definitely requires some list tailoring. The biggest challenge will be the guy who spams conscripts and drop troops because they will grab objectives while conscripts tie you up the entire game. That type of list will easily be the most challenging.

All slaaensh for cacophony. No point in obsec because of conscupt spam so just try to blast them with high T and -1 bikes. Drop troops would still out number your drops but could use obliterators to counter objective holding

I haven’t seen anybody mention the take cover order… I suspect it will be the first whoops correction. RAW right now it works on anything… 2+/4++ against shooting knight for a CP yes please… combo with canticles? 1+ /3++ omg guard so cheap you can squeeze 15 CP and actually have teeth? Terrain is going to be super important